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How to make Google forget my pages ?

I've decided to delete many pages from my website wich had poor content.

I've made a php 301 redirect from all these old pages to a unique page (not the home page, a deep page).

My problem is that this modification has been made a week ago and my position in the SERPs have crashed down...

What can I do ? I believe that I'll get up again when Google will see that these pages don't exist anymore but it could take a long time :( (these page are in the Google cache with a date older than my modification's date)

I've read somewhere that I should put a link to the destination page (where old pages are 301 redirected) but I don't understand how it could help...

Can someone help me ? Tell me what I've done wrong...

These pages were very poor and I've deleted them in order to boost the global quality of my site... It should help me in the SERPs, not penalize me...

4 Responses

If you are completely removing these pages, you also want them removed from the search engine directories. Google has Webmaster Tools to do this, and you also have to update robots.txt so the search engines will stop trying to crawl pages that do not exist anymore.

Not sure about the "other guys". With Microsoft creating Bing and taking over Yahoo, I'm not sure they're up to snuff yet. However, Bing does have Webmaster Tools as well (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/), but I haven't played around with all of its features just yet.

Yea, they're not going to let you bog down their server with that many requests! LOL

I was unaware of the 1000s of pages and URLs you now want redirected. And if those pages had links going to your other pages, you've officially removed any link juice they were providing for one another which would impact your rank. Page A to Page B and so on...

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